Freeway Ricky Ross Labels Hip-hop a Weapon of Social Control

Former crack cocaine kingpin Freeway Ricky Ross accused superstar rappers including Jay Z and former prison guard Rick Rock of glorifying and implicitly encouraging drug dealing and thug life this week in an interview with PrisonPlanet polemicist Alex Jones, going on to explicitly link its popularity to America’s prison-industrial complex.

“I had come up with a mentality about myself that I was dumb, stupid, that all I should be was a thug. And that thugging was cool. When I looked around from my prison cell and started to look at all my friends, they all thought the same way,” he told Jones.

“And it was this programming that put us in this position that dealing drugs and gang banging was easy for us to accept. I believe that Hip Hop is doing that right now but on a more massive scale.”

Radical comedian and self declared Marxist Alexei Sayle, meanwhile, launched a lacerating attack on talent shows in the UK singling out in particular Strictly Come Dancing for being ‘systematic propaganda’ designed to lull people onto mediocrity.

“The propaganda role of the talent show is to promote the idea of simplicity over complexity, of popularity over talent, of banality over genuine invention because complexity encourages critical thought and critical thought is the enemy of authoritarianism”, he suggested in the Guardian.

“What the celebrities who appear on Strictly are doing is taking part in the ongoing cultural war on critical thinking,” he said